How long does it take to make an apple? In average, 150 days up to a perfect mature stage. But based on winter basement survivors, complete ripening isn’t happening too fast in good conditions. Apples seem to be a good model fruit. Well, it’s economically demanding too. Scientifically sound or so. And before I swamp into more trivia, this is just to let you know about a recent study* that did the big run of mashing gene expression during apple development from bud and buzz to fruitful fruit.
The main point (or, at least, of immediate general scientific interest, or is there such a thing as a “general scientific interest”?), is that 16 genes expressed during fruiting have been identified, that are expressed similarly in developping tomatoes too (fruits, not plants). These are thus core genes involved in fruit making. We may thus have soon the basic gene scheme for fruit making. Waiting for the upcoming flow chart… (Huh, as I am interested in genes that make fruit different, or special, I guess I’ll have to wait a bit longer).
How many genes does it take to make an apple? There are at least 1950 genes whose expression levels change during time as a result of maturing a fruit. This does not mean others are useless of course, since you need all the classics to get your basic function go ahead, but at least 1950 have a specific use requiring an increase in expression during an apple development. That’s a lot isn’t it?
Well, at least they can be assigned to their respective function-categories: control of cell division (early fruit development), accumulating starch (making reserves, that’s all about becoming a fruit!), and beginning of the ripening process (ripening may not appear too appealing as a category name, but that’s actually when acquiring a fine aroma takes place).
The least we can say is that that’s really a fruitful research…
* B.J. Janssen, K. Thodey, R.J. Schaffer, R. Alba, L. Balakrishnan, R. Bishop, J.H. Bowen, R.N. Crowhurst, A.P. Gleave, S. Ledger, S. McArtney, F.B. Pichler, K.C. Snowden, S. Ward (2008). Global gene expression analysis of apple fruit development from the floral bud to ripe fruit. BMC Plant Biology 2008, 8:16.
(access to full length article here).
Filed under: English, Fruits, Plant stuff, Science
Haha nice read!! Do all the different variaties of apples have the same basic genes and then its just environmental effects (cross polination for example) and a few not so basic genes that makes the different varieties?
Ah well, keep up the great work!
Cheers!
Well, that’s a further step that science will take someday… Anyway if varieties may not differ in the number of genes they’ll certainly do it through modified levels of gene expression (though if you read the paper the expression of specific genes is dramatically altered in at least 2 different apple varieties, to the point they had to modify their gene fishing set up by adding a few more targets they missed first).
But genomics is still at a young stage of research and understanding the basics at a gross level is still an up-to-date way of doing things. But I guess soon we’ll be to the point of investigating differences instead of looking for commonalities!